Supporting Teacher Professionalism
Insights from TALIS 2013
This report examines the nature and extent of support for teacher professionalism using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013, a survey of teachers and principals in 34 countries and economies around the world. Teacher professionalism is defined as the knowledge, skills, and practices that teachers must have in order to be effective educators.
The report focuses on lower secondary teachers (ISCED 2) in different education systems and looks at cross-cultural differences in teacher professionalism. It explores how teacher professionalism is linked to policy-relevant teacher outcomes such as perceived status, satisfaction with profession and school environment or perceived self-efficacy. The publication also tackles equity concerns in teacher professionalism: it examines professionalism support gaps, which are defined as differences in support for teacher professionalism in schools with high levels of disadvantage as compared to those with low-levels of disadvantage. Last but not least, the report presents a number of policy-relevant recommendations to enhance teacher professionalism and equity in access to high-quality teaching in OECD member countries.
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Technical annex
This technical annex outlines how the indices of professionalism are constructed, and contains additional information on their distribution. The approach to scale construction in this study differs from that used by the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) for complex scales, such as their scales for job satisfaction and teacher efficacy, which weigh factors differently based on their contribution to an underlying latent variable. In this report, additive scales are created based on implementation of best practices, rather than complex scales based on latent variables. Following recommendations of the TALIS 2013 Technical Report (OECD, 2014b), similar scales are created using confirmatory factor analysis and test for overall fit and scalar invariance. In most cases, the scales exhibit a relatively good fit overall cross-nationally, but are not scalar invariant across all countries. We also find that additive component scales are very highly correlated to factor scales (~0.90+), while also having the added advantages of comparability. As such, we made the decision to work with the additive composite indices because they are more intuitive, comparable and have better distributions for subsequent analyses.
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